Robert Hill Long – Five Poems

Post navigation

His given name is Robinson.
He changed it to Robinsong
as a trust-fund stoner,
but Robinson returned at forty:
his inheritance was too blue-chip
to maintain the Earth-First masquerade.

People mistake you for Garcia
though Jerryâ€™s dead. Premature white
in the beard, plus guitar
plus aviator glasses plus bellyâ€”
his father always shaved, wore
contacts, breakfasted on Special K

and left him a million
after his fatal Nixon-resignation-speech stroke.
When Reagan confessed to Alzheimerâ€™s
Robinson possessed half the principal
after years of jam-band cocaine.
He could live on that.

All he had to do
was fire the redneck roadies
who drank his Jack Daniels
and let his backing quartet
(plus shrieking, witch-haired, redneck vocalist)
keep their money-losing hippie band-name:

Robinsong. He surrendered massive amplifiers,
coke-stocked limousines, trashed hotels, groupie
anonymities, in his fatherâ€™s name.
Spent winters learning rent-party swing
off the 78s father spun
when he was getting nothing

from mother making her career
of weeping upstairs, with views
of the Atlantic that reduced
everything to saltâ€”Lotâ€™s wife,
no daughters provided for her
widower to screw to perpetuate

the world. Hereâ€™s Robinson, solo,
middling, resembling a dead rocker,
paying inherited steep property taxes
in order to master what
Coltrane produced by forgetting slavery.
Heâ€™s no robin-song, but like

a songbirdâ€™s progeny he migrates
Manhattan to Key West: guitar
generous as his motherâ€™s hips,
tight as her shoulders, arched
to deliver whether the gig
is lounge-cheap or uptown-chichi. â€œYes,

Still, Iâ€™d like to ask
why you turned your back
on writing songs people sing.
Because I love that task.

Somewhere along your self-pitying way
you gave up on words
as angels, so their poetry
gave up on you. Jazz

became your hermit cave, bad
as dad with his twilit
solo golf: a terminal withdrawal
from love, speech, the hitâ€”

better than any designer drugâ€”
from making stadiums of music-lovers
happy. I know how brief
that ecstasy is. How big

the emptiness afterward, breaking down,
back onto the interstate bus
with girls wanting to fuck
my name from Saint Louis

to Denver. Maybe thatâ€™s when
you began to be born,
post-ecstasy-Robinson: those girls
so like mom, so avid

for love dad wouldnâ€™t give
she made her couch headquarters
for a parade of lifeguards.
Sorry, but she felt alive

in a manâ€™s arms. No?
You have a rebuttal maybe.
More cereal-box wisdom, further stale-bread
prophecies? I didnâ€™t think so.

**

Broken Water

Stars befall Alabama, but meteors
shower Robinson when he showersâ€”
musical ideas clear as water,
as democratic, alas, and vague.
Falling waterâ€™s the pedal note
to his most naked improvisings:
he scats modal chromatic things
that once he towels dry

fail to resume, or if
they rewind and begin again,
donâ€™t constitute the ultimate beguine.
Does this mean water is

essence of compostion and life?
Sure. Robinson has been there,
swimming through his motherâ€™s broken
waters. Heâ€™s the surviving skin

of her heartbeatâ€™s excitable drum,
boom boom, and getting wet
and naked keeps composing him
into a song she tried

to sing after it fell
out of her, bloody, wailing.
Why couldnâ€™t he have been
there when she was done

with breathing, trapped upside-downâ€”salt-marsh
water refilling her magnificent lungsâ€”,
grabbing at her broke-necked spouse.
Itâ€™s a truly mother-empty house

where Robinson lathers his hair
with Doctor Bronnerâ€™s Peppermint Soap
and scat-sings as though hope
had a perpetual maternal audience.

Sorry, Robinson. Perpetuity occurs once
or twice, then God yanks
the wheel and mother drowns
amid sawgrass and fiddler crabs.

This is why melody grabs
fistfuls of water, unable to
stave off forgetting itself: why
being drily alone is drab

and apparently unending until God
remembers to loose another meteor,
Robinson-sized, to cancel his vain
recreation myth in the shower.

What power God has, improviser
of the highest degree. See
where motherâ€™s memories become marsh?
Robinson drives past each day

heâ€™s home. Itâ€™s not much
of a curve, Airlie Road,
descending left where the Waterway
sprouts clouds, sails. You touch

the wheel, the vehicle responds.
Oversteer its margin of error
and she says, Never mind,
my boy, youâ€™ll live forever.

Define forever: stars falling into
her marsh. Water cascades down
Robinson. Donâ€™t leave the shower,
child. Our music ceases here.

Like this:

Related

Post navigation

Published by crash macewan

Publisher, Editor, Author, Assemblage Artist, Possum Wrangler, Southern Swamp Aficionado and all around great gal who's brought you the Dead Mule, with the help of a host of others (names included on About page soon) for over TWENTY years.
"No good Southern fiction is complete without a Dead Mule." V MacEwan 1996
View all posts by crash macewan